The ACA requires insurance companies to provide new mothers with breast pumps and other equipment that is necessary to help them breast feed.
Unfortunately, the law doesn’t specify the type or quality of the breast pumps to be provided, so the companies (with doctors’ recommendations) get to decide. This issue leads to whether a company will provide a manual or an electric pump.
The benefits of an electric pump over a manual pump are several: they’re high-powered and can simulate a nursing child, while manual pumps can be weak, clumsy, and cumbersome for a working mother to use. They take more time to pump than an electrical pump.
The costs are also considerably different, when a high-end electric pump coming in at around $300, and a manual pump costing as little as $35.